Twelve years ago, at the time of this writing, in the year 2000 a third-grade class was deeply involved in learning about the Holocaust, and Simone Schweber studied them. She was taking up the questions of how old is old enough to learn about the Holocaust and what are the repercussions, morally and educationally, of learning about it at a young age. At the time, a few academics had written about the question theoretically, but none empirically. Harriet Sepinwall emphasized the importance for young children of understanding the Holocaustâs themes so as to help create a more just and peaceful world.1 Samuel Totten countered that Holocaust education necessitated including its âhorrific aspectsâ and was therefore too potentially psychologically damaging for young children.2
In the hopes of providing a nuanced policy recommendation, Schweber sought out and investigated the class of a very experienced and well-respected teacher.3 Her study included interviews with the teacher, with select students from the class, and with their parents or guardians. It also included classroom observations of the entire Holocaust unit as well as analysis of all the studentsâ work. At the end of the unit, the parents, teacher, and many of the students concluded that it had been appropriate for them; Schweber, however, concluded that on the whole, these students were too young for this particular enactment. Though the teacher was unarguably excellent and the parents tremendously supportive, Schweber argued against teaching about the Holocaust, in depth, to third graders.
The one Jewish student in the class had particularly influenced Schweberâs recommendation. Lila understood both the events and the significance of what she was learning and during the unit developed a âreal depressionâ according to her parents. She had nightmares, stopped playing with her brother, and was unable to finish an interview with Schweber because she needed to cry. Schweber remembers asking Lila tentatively at the time whether the interview itself was making her cry or if what they were talking about, the Holocaust unit at school, was. Lila indicated that it was the latter, and Schweber stopped the interview to hug her. While Lilaâs were not unreasonable reactions, their weightiness pushed Schweber to argue that students should be taught about the Holocaust only later in their formal schooling lives.
Influential at its publication, Schweberâs study left many related questions unanswered, such as how old students ought to be when they are first exposed to the topic and what results different kinds of early exposure would yield. Almost a decade later, no other in-depth empirical studies of Holocaust learning in the early grades have been publishedâthough much other research has expanded the scope of the field in powerful ways: how national narratives and Holocaust history shape learning about it,4 the connections of Holocaust history to other atrocities,5 the challenges in presenting content from victimsâ perspectives,6 âbest practicesâ in Holocaust education,7 what takes place when learning about the Holocaust,8 and how âheritage learningâ is negotiated and interpreted across homes and schools.9 And yet very few of these studies focus on the elementary years, despite the fact that many states in the USA mandate the teaching of the Holocaust, even in the early grades.10 Moreover, of the very few long-term studies of educational impacts,11 none focus on Holocaust education.
The study discussed here reopens Schweberâs initial study, considering the long-term effects of Holocaust education, by asking the following questions: What are the psychological and intellectual aftereffects of early Holocaust education? How does identity mediate Holocaust education? And, how, if at all, does early experience matter over time? Though this case does not answer these questions with surgical precision, it does offer insights based on empirical research.
Theoretical Framework
Grounded in a constructionist epistemology,12 we developed a theoretical framework that draws on the interrelated categories of sensemaking, narrativization, self-perception, and memory. To understand sensemaking, we relied on Vaughn and Weickâs notions that new information is taken up within preexisting frames of reference formulated by past experience.13 We were also interested in âthe narrativization of real events,â14 how our participants âstoriedâ their memories of that time and its impacts thereafter. Where they âbeganâ the story of what they remembered from that time mattered to us as researchers as it helped us position them as actors in their own memories. Similarly the ââmiddlesâ and âendingsâ of their narratives could be rendered as stories of engagement or lack thereof, of confusion, emotion, long-term trauma, or consistent interest. The plotlines of their stories, we imagined, would implicitly express their positions as much as the contents of their narratives explicitly did. As Deborah Britzman writes in her discussions of so-called difficult knowledge, âWhen individuals narrate experience, theyâŠexpress their affective investments in knowing and being known, in new editions of old educational conflicts, and in their fragile working of reconsidering what will count as worthy and worthless in teaching and learning.â15
In terms of self-perceptions, we were interested in the subcategories of agency, competence, and belonging,16 asking how the narrations of that early experience reflected heightened or diminished agency, greater or lesser competence, and shifted or shifting senses of belonging. We were well aware that oppositional identities were simultaneously possible; the same student, for example, might remember experiencing an increased sense of belonging in the classroom by virtue of identifying with what was being taught while simultaneously remembering a diminished sense of belonging by virtue of the classroom dynamics. Or she might experience a greater sense of belonging to one community while simultaneously experiencing a diminished sense of belonging to another, whether âimaginedâ or real.
Finally, it is worth foregrounding the fact that the entirety of this study plays out within the realm of memory. Because we were asking what participants in that early study remembered about the experience it was based on and how they thought that experience shaped their later learning and thinking, we were essentially asking about memory: how memory works in sensemaking, how it shows up in narrativization, and how it plays out in identity construction. For a theorization of memory, we relied on Michael Rothbergâs notion of âmultidirectional memoryâ17 in which memory can be triggered by and serve in turn as a trigger to the memories of other historical events. As Rothberg explains, âMemories of particular events come and go and sometimes take on a surprising importance long after the materiality of the events remembered has faded from view.â18 Moreover, âan important epistemological gain in considering memory as multidirectional instead of as competitive is the insightâŠthat the emergence of memories into the public often takes place through triggers that may at first seem irrelevant or even unseemlyâ (ibid). This study, by asking what early Holocaust education catalyzed, aims to explore connections that memory enabled, forged, and repressed.
In thinking about the mysterious workings of memory, we were influenced by Kahneman and Tverskyâs groundbreaking studies. Kahnemanâs (2011) distillation of their work together posits a series of âuseful fictionsâ to explain the evolutionary modes of how memory functions. The âpeak-end rule,â as Kahneman calls it, applies to the emotional valence of the ending of an experience. If the experience ends well, a person will remember it positively, which can trump the unpleasantness of the experience itself as it is occurring, even when prolonged, which Kahneman calls âduration neglect.â As Kahneman explains, the selves that remember our experiences make up our identities, not the selves that experience what is later remembered. Hence it is all the more important to see how early experiences are remembered for it is precisely remembering that positions our identities in relation to the world. Phrased differently, we were interested in the âstrangersâ that are our past selves brought to the forefront by our remembering selves in the present.
Methodology
Methodologically, we relied on both narrative inquiry19 and portraiture,20 using a so-called enlightened eye21 to strike a balance between how participants in the research remembered their pasts and how we as researchers interpreted them. We attempted to be both ââŠgenerous and tough, skeptical and receptive [and]âŠwatchful of feelings, perspective, and experience.â22
We conducted semistructured interviews with some of the participants from the original study. The generated data set was then analyzed for both the categories of interest we had identified going in (significance of the experience, emotions attached to its memory) and for emergent categories of importance (Jewishness, context of learning, sociability). Though we had hoped to interview all of the participants from the initial study, they proved hard to track down twelve years after the fact. This chapter thus focuses on a single, focal student from the first study, Lila, her two parents, and Mr. Kupnich, the remarkable third-grade teacher. Triangulating across these angles of vision results in a rich portrait of what mattered for framing multidirectional memory.
Lila Then and Now
In the third grade, Lila struck Schweber as bright, intuitive, sensitive, articulate, and wise. She was bubbly, intellectually curious, and somewhat precocious. Over the course of the Holocaust unit, though, Lila became distressed and saddened by the content, and because the unit was taught at the end of the school year, Lila ended third grade feeling that way.
Twelve years later, Lila presented as sensitive, self-aware, articulate, and thoughtful. A college sophomore at a Big Ten school, Lila described herself as being invested in social activism, committed to fighting against injustice, and intensely Jewishâall of which she connected to her early schooling experiences. At the time of the interview, she was considering majoring in history in the hopes of becoming a high school teacher upon graduation.
Lilaâs memories of her third-grade experience were both vivid and abstract. She remembered learning about the Holocaust in Mr. Kupnichâs class. She remembered the heaviness of the experience emotionally, and she remembered particular moments with surprising precision. The first open-ended question we posed to Lila as a college student was what she remembered from the third grade generally. Schweber had thought of her third-grade self as well-integrated in the class, a somewhat self-assured leader, a big personality, unafraid of speaking her mind and dedicated to sharing her ideas. In sharp contrast to this impression, Lila described feeling separate from her classmates and very much alone:
When asked what she remembered from her third-grade experience of learning about the Holocaust specifically, Lila expanded on her sense of isolation:Third grade was really hard for me. Elementary school was in general really hard for me. I didnât feel like I had any friends. I didnât feel like I really fit in. Iâve always been very curious and pretty smart and very caring and also very sensitive. (June 14, 2013)
I remember being the only Jewish kid in the class. I think that was a really important, that really defined the experience for me. I remember that it was really hard and really emotionalâŠ.
Lilaâs transition from past to present tense in this response was not incidental. Other moments in the interview made clear that when Lila learns about the Holocaust currently, as an adult, she remembers the profound sense of loneliness that characterized her learning the subject in third grade. The shift in tense signifie...The distinct memory I always think about is when we watched the movie about Anne Frank. [Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001)]. And then the next day my class went to the zoo and everyone else was like laughing and happy and happyâŠ. I was nine years old and had to sleep with my parents that night because I had really bad nightmares. Then the next day I was sitting on the bus being like, âHow could everyone just be like having fun and not thinking about it?â And I was really stuck in it. When I learn about the Holocaust, thatâs what I think aboutâŠ.Thatâs what I remember from the third gradeâŠ. (Lila, June 14, 2013)